Sherry won’t abandon her mother, and the speaker is either stuck with the three of them jammed into the same small car, or he can move on, hoping to catch the eye of one of those “girls melting on the beach,” but the Vice President doesn’t have that option when it comes to casting off the President himself.
Last week, the newly crowned Harris-Walz campaign released a video on YouTube, where Governor Walz cites Bruce Springsteen’s 1980 classic The River as a transformational album in his life. “So, Tim, what’s your relationship to music?” Vice President Harris asked a straightforward question with some rather odd phrasing to start the segment, followed by a brief cackle as if even she couldn’t believe they’re reduced to this. “Yeah,” the Governor says at first before continuing, “For me, the transformational piece of music was Bruce Springsteen’s The River.” “OK,” the Vice President intones knowingly, undoubtedly without knowing anything about the album, while Governor Walz continues, “Which is a journey you know,” “Yeah,” she interjects again, “You know all the tracks, and I’m that guy” he notes before talking about the eight track in his first car. As luck would have it, the second track on The River happens to be “Sherry Darling,” a comedic romp Springsteen wrote years earlier (and performed on piano with Steven Van Zandt supposedly for the first and only time during the recording of Darkness on the Edge of Town) about a man whose relationship with his girlfriend is threatened by the annoying, inescapable presence of the girlfriend’s mother. It might just be me, but it also seems an apt metaphor for how the budding political romance between Vice President Harris and Governor Walz remains threatened by the continued presence of President Joe Biden, who, contrary to what the media would have you believe, still looms over the race or at least the stench of his failure still clings to his Vice President. Thus, when Springsteen begins by complaining, “Your momma’s yappin’ in the back seat, Tell her to push over and move them big feet,” we can imagine President Biden, Vice President Harris, and Governor Walz all piled into the same tiny car headed halfway to nowhere. Harris and Walz are trying to point the vehicle in a new direction, hoping to get somewhere fast with barely 80 days left in the race, but the President keeps yappin’ about how he knows exactly where they’re going and his oversized appendages are figuratively crowding them all out. After all, this is a man who, speaking through his aides, still insists he could’ve won the race, at least according to The New York Times. “People close to President Biden say he believes he could have won a second term. But he came to realize that the fight would rip apart the Democratic Party that he had served his whole life” they reported last week. “Steve Ricchetti, the president’s eyes and ears on Capitol Hill, and Mike Donilon, his chief strategist, had shared internal polling with the president that Saturday that mirrored what Americans had been seeing for weeks: Mr. Biden was falling behind, nationally and in key battleground states. There was still a path to victory, they advised him, but the fight would be ugly. The president would be pitted against his donors, half of his party in Congress and Democratic voters who had concluded that he was too old to win.” As Axios described it in a related report, a friend claimed the President was “still stunned and pissed about the way he was pushed out of his re-election race.”
From that perspective, Vice President Harris and Governor Walz, both literally and figuratively, hope to eject the President from their political mobile before they crash into the brick wall that is former President Donald Trump. “Sherry Darling” puts it this way, “Every Monday morning I gotta drive her down to the unemployment agency, Well this morning I ain’t fighting, tell her I give up, Tell her she wins if she’ll just shut up, But it’s the last time that she’s gonna be ridin’ with me.” Unfortunately for them, endless chatter isn’t all that’s causing Vice President Harris and Governor Walz discomfort, either. The two must also find a means to extricate themselves from the President’s seemingly endless series of policy disasters, taking credit for what their fellow Democrats believe has been a success while pretending to the American people that they’d have done it all differently, or at least produced a different result, if they were in charge the entire time. Last week, for example, marked the two year anniversary of the so-called Inflation Reduction Act, which was supposed to revolutionize the energy industry to prevent global warming. The two held a joint event to celebrate the unspecified savings that resulted from a provision allowing Medicare to negotiate drug prices. Without a single specific beyond “billions of dollars of savings on the 10 of the most expensive prescription drugs” according to The Hill, the President declared, “For years, Big Pharma blocked Medicare for negotiating lower drug prices. This time, we finally beat Big Pharma. And, I might add, with no help from Republicans. Not a single Republican voted for this bill, period.” For her part, the Vice President claimed, “My entire career, I have worked to hold bad actors accountable and lower the cost of prescription drugs. Two years ago, as vice president, I was proud to cast the tie breaking vote that sent the bill that gave Medicare the power to negotiate and let it get to the president’s desk.” Left unsaid: Prices, overall, are up about 20% since President Biden and Vice President Harris during their tenure. As Yahoo News reported in May, “Prices as measured by the seasonally adjusted Consumer Price Index (CPI) are now up over 19.4% in the three-plus years since Biden took office.” Prices for certain goods including energy and food have skyrocketed even further along with crushing inflation wreaking havoc on the house and auto markets. Nor have the so-called green energy provisions delivered what they promised considering the electric car market cratered rather than exploded, complete with stagnant demand from customers and companies losing untold billions. (Did they lose as much as we supposedly saved?) Provisions in the much lauded infrastructure bill have produced perhaps even less impressive results with a $7.5 billion investment in superchargers building only eight stations across the entire country in thirty months and not a mile of new broadband services despite an even larger tranche of funding. Lastly, the most recent employment numbers and the resulting stock market panic make it apparent that many of us may soon be joining Sherry’s momma at the unemployment agency whether we like it or not.
At the same time, Springsteen, or more properly, the speaker in the song, doesn’t appear naive enough to believe it’s actually “the last time that she’s gonna be ridin’ with me.” Both personal and political relationships often come with a lot of baggage, at least some of which we cannot easily extricate ourselves from, making it not much of a surprise when the chorus continues and momma’s still yakking it up in the car, “And you can tell her there’s a hot sun beatin’ on the black top. She keeps talkin’, she’ll be walking that last block. She can take a subway back to the ghetto tonight.” President Biden might well have said his peace at the Democrat National Convention last night by rehashing his belief that they ousted the fourteenth best President in US history for a younger woman, plus of course President Trump is evil and a threat to the very democracy they themselves thwarted to oust Biden in the first place. Seriously, he said, “Democracy has prevailed. Democracy has delivered. Democracy must be preserved,” Vice President Harris might well have attempted to send him back to the White House on the equivalent of a subway as soon as it was over to keep his failures from public view, but much like Springsteen realizes as the chorus concludes, it’s wishful thinking he can simply be made to disappear. If anything, Presidents may be even harder to get rid of than mothers, but the speaker still dreams of being alone together in the chorus even if just for a midnight drive, “Well, I got some beer and the highway’s free, And I got you, and baby, you’ve got me, Hey, hey, hey, what you say, Sherry Darling?” Instead, even though there’s good things happening somewhere, “girls melting on the beach,” “so fine and so out of reach, “I’m stuck in traffic down here on 53rd Street. Now Sherry,” he insists much like Vice President Harris, “my love for you is real, But I didn’t count on this package deal, And baby, this car just ain’t big enough for her and me.” Ridin’ with Biden might be quite similar these days, especially considering the bad blood between them. As The Daily Beast wrote last week, “Morning Joe regular Mike Barnicle, a close friend of the president, reportedly met a former senior White House official at Fenway Park in Boston who said to him: ‘Isn’t it great that f****** guy finally figured out he had to quit?’ Barnicle is said to have replied: ‘You know something? F*** you! And f*** all your friends with their anonymous quotes in the papers. Put your name on it next time!’ The President himself supposedly found the story hilarious, with one source familiar with his reaction telling Axios: ‘He might still be laughing.’” They concluded, “Despite any initial reservations about Harris’ ability to lead, Biden is under no illusions that she is the best bet to beat Trump in November, reports say. His legacy will depend on how she fares in the ballot box. If she loses, the party faithful won’t be talking behind their hands about how he waited too long to hand over the reins. They will be shouting it from the rooftops.”
To beat President Trump, however, the Vice President needs to overcome significant deficits on key issues resulting from her tenure under her boss, and by extension, her own policies, what we might say is the girlfriend figuratively escaping the long shadow of her mother. Donald Trump currently leads Kamala Harris on immigration (13 points), the economy (8 points), foreign policy, crime, and being a strong leader (5 points), guns (3 points), and even, rather surprisingly if I don’t say so myself, shared values (2 points). Vice President Harris meanwhile leads on climate change and abortion (both 18 points), and healthcare (11 points), along with a few softer factors like temperament and being mentally sound, whatever that means in this context. While many of these numbers represent an improvement over President Biden, they’ve also occurred over three weeks of the silliest silly season in recent memory, where the Vice President has simultaneously been coronated as the most exciting candidate since President Barack Obama despite having received not a single primary vote and been able to disavow all her previous positions without comment. In other words, she has yet to explain how she’s transformed from a far-left progressive who supported open borders, an end to fossil fuels, defund the police, the forced confiscation of firearms, the forced end of private health insurance, and more to a centrist Democrat that has repudiated all of her prior positions. What did she learn between 2019 and today that prompted her to completely change her mind on what would normally be considered core, immutable positions for an adult? Consider Senator Bernie Sanders, who was technically to the right of the Vice President when they were in Congress together. Has he changed his position on any of these issues over the past four years? Did he alter them at all when he ran for President not once, but twice, or is he as unabashedly progressive as ever, for better or worse? Would he alter them under any circumstances? If not him, then why has Vice President Harris altered them across almost every single issue save for crass political expediency? “Despite her role as vice president, Kamala Harris is not currently burdened with President Joe Biden’s unpopularity, and is seen by a majority of voters as offering a chance to turn the page of the Trump/Biden era’ and representing a ‘new generation of leadership,’” explained Cook Political Report Publisher Amy Walter after some positive Harris-Walz polling last week. “Harris’ success in closing the gap [on Trump] is driven by her consolidation of the Democratic base, and increased support among independent voters. With partisans now equally engaged, the next 80-plus days will be a battle of inches centered on (re)defining the vice president’s image and defining the issues over which the presidential election will be fought.”
For its part, “Sherry Darling” closes with another round of even more wishful thinking:
Well, let there be sunlight, let there be rain
Let my broken heart love again
Sherry, we can run with our arms open wide before the tide
To all the girls down at Sacred Heart
And all you operators back in the Park
Say hey, hey, hey, what you say, Sherry Darling?
Somehow, however, the audience knows this will never happen. Sherry won’t abandon her mother, and the speaker is either stuck with the three of them jammed into the same small car, or he can move on, hoping to catch the eye of one of those “girls melting on the beach,” but the Vice President doesn’t have that option. As last night shows, she’s stuck with the President, comically so to the point where the Democrat platform references this second term an astounding nineteen times, the three of them in one tiny clown car with a big Bidenomics bumper sticker on the back, and the American people are likely to figure it out before it’s too late.
SHERRY DARLING
Confessions of a Conservative Atheist 